Many companies and/or businesses will often have an employee pay for their expenses first and will reimburse the employee for their expenses later. Expense reports are generally used to track the time, date, amount, vendor, service provider, location, currency, and/or other information associated with these expenses. Employees often spend a significant amount of time creating expense reports. Employees often need to collect physical receipts and ensure they do not lose them prior to completion of their expense report. They may manually enter a range of information from the receipt into a computer system, spreadsheet, device application, or online portal to complete the report. They may also categorize the receipts manually (e.g., receipt for dinner, etc.). In many cases the employee may also convert the currencies on the receipts to local currencies on the expense report. In addition, the employee may also need to submit physical copies of the receipts with the expense report. Even after all of the employee's work, a third person (e.g. in finance or accounting) may double-check whether the information on receipts has been entered correctly by the employees and whether the proper category for each expense was elected.
Many companies, businesses, and/or other business entities may have employees provide copies of their receipts and submit copies of the receipts with their expense reports. Printing photographs of the receipts (taken by digital cameras, cellular phones, smartphones, and/or other cameras) may cause an employer to use ink (e.g., color ink or toner) more quickly. Also, many companies, businesses, and/or other business entities may have procedures or guidelines that indicate that the receipts submitted with expense reports look like actual photocopies and/or faxes of the receipts, and may not accept digital images (e.g., digital photographs) of receipts. In addition, transmitting color images of receipts to other computing devices (such as a server) may use more bandwidth and storage space than submitting black-and-white, gray-scale and/or otherwise compressed receipt images. In addition, some corporate backend systems, document archiving, accounting or expense systems may have size limitations (e.g., memory and/or file size limitations) for uploaded files (e.g., images of receipts). A full color photograph of a receipt may still exceed the size limitations even when compressed. Furthermore, computing devices (such as smartphones) often have limited network bandwidth and/or limited data usage available (e.g., cellular services providers may limit the amount of data a user may transmit and/or receive). Larger image files of receipts may take longer to upload to a server and may also use a larger amount of a user's allowed data usage.